Multilingual Software from IITM

[RAH]

Indologists,
In the article called "Path-breaking work" by N. Krishnaswamy on pages
83-85 of the 3 October 1997 issue of _Frontline_ there is a description
of a multilingual software package that has been developed by students
and professors at IIT Chennai. The article mentions the fact that there
are many Sanskrit texts in transliterated form available on line,
especially at "a Liverpool Website", and it says that "The package has
been able to transliterate these texts back into Sanskrit with a
remarkable degree of accuracy." Further on, the author of the article
gives two URLs where the package is available for downloading and where
demos are available. Those URLs are:

in India: http://sdlcfsn.cs.iitm.ernet.in

and in the US: http://taylor.mc.duke.edu/~rrk (here there is a typo.
Don't go to ~rrk, go to ~rkk.)

Here is a brief description of what I found at the US site. The program
consists of three basic applications: 1) a viewing program that can be
used on a web browser, 2) a multilingual line editor which can be used to
prepare documents in any language currently available, or any combination
of languages, and 3) a print utility that will convert the document you
produce with that editor into a PostScript file.

The languages currently available are: Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada,
Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati.
Non-Indian languages available are: Japanese Hiragana, Hebrew and Greek.
Urdu and Arabic, and so I assume Persian, etc. also, are scheduled for
inclusion in a year's time.

This program has been ported to many commonly used platforms and OSs.
It can operate in DOS 3.3 or higher, even with only 512 k memory. It
operates in Windows 3.x and Win95, but it seems to be slower than in DOS.
It works in a Macintosh machine with a CPU of 68020 or higher. It works
in UNIX or LINUX systems, with or without X-Window support. And it has
been ported to AIX.

I would be interested in the experiences of anyone who has had a chance
to use this intriguing software.

By the way, there is also an ftp address for downloading:
        tulip.ee.ndsu.nodak.edu/pub/iitmsw

All the best,
Bob Hueckstedt

Robert A. Hueckstedt, Associate Professor of Indic Languages
Asian Studies Centre, 328 Fletcher Argue, University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/asian_studies
phone 1 204 474-6427 fax 1 204 474-7601